Digital format is becoming an increasingly popular form for storing all types of information. For example, music, audio, video, and multimedia may be stored in digital formats.
With the advent of the Internet and the multitude of peer-to-peer services, such as Napster, individuals routinely assemble large collections of digital files on their personal digital devices. For example, a recent poll on the collection of MPEG-Layer 3 (“MP3”) files stored on individuals digital devices illustrated that a quarter of the respondents' collections contain at least nine gigabytes of digital audio.
As a result of the massive growth in the size of these personal collections, research and development tools supporting file management has become increasingly active. For example, providing summaries of digital music has become a key area in this field. Given summaries of MP3 files, users can navigate and sample music databases more efficiently, whether browsing music at e-commerce websites or within personal collections. Furthermore, distribution of music summaries in place of complete files bypasses many security concerns of content providers.
Currently techniques for generating music summaries frequently produce summaries that do not adequately represent the piece of music being summarized. For example, one technique for summarizing a piece of music divides the piece into fixed length time segments and analyzes each segment, groups the segments into clusters and then selects a segment from one of the clusters as the summary. However, this technique frequently segments the piece at undesirable locations and selects a segment of the piece that does not adequately represent the piece of music.
Therefore, it is desirable to Produce a system and method that automatically summarizes a digital file on one or more computers, such as a music file, and generates a summary that adequately represents that digital file.